Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Animation: B

How many Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies have there been now, anyway? Seven, apparently—the first one having been released thirty-three years ago. The film franchise has reached the age Jesus did! I suppose one could make the argument that it’s time for a similar self-sacrifice for the greater good, except that Mutant Mayhem is actually kind of fun.

This is what I keep wondering, though: how many actual teenagers really care? In this new film, which really qualifies as a third reboot of the franchise, a pointed plot point is the fact that our four mutant turtles are fifteen years old. When these versions of the turtle-kids were born, the film franchise was already eighteen years old, and old enough to have been rebooted the first time.

This is an intellectual property based on an original comic book that was first published in 1984. As in, the characters themselves are one year shy of forty years old. I suppose I could be off base here, but I can’t imagine many actual fifteen-year-olds having much in the way of passionate interest in this. Instead, new iterations of this franchise have been trading on nostalgia for it for the past two decades.

Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the script and co-produced, is 41 years old, making him pretty squarely in the target demographic at this point. This is a fun movie for him and people like him. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think this movie is going to take the youth by storm. It may have been one of many “bonkers-cool” concepts from our childhood, but time is a weird thing, which can turn even the weirdest things into something quaint.

On the other hand, maybe Mutant Mayhem isn’t made for a youth audience. The PG rating is pretty tame, but I found certain elements of it surprisingly dark at times. It actually kind of feels made for the middle-aged fans who have been waiting for a halfway decent film treatment after countless examples of mediocrity, and in that sense, it succeeds.

Not that it’s great. It’s better than mediocre, but not a whole lot better than good. As we watch these teenage mutant ninja turtles pining for a place in the human world outside of the sewer home in which a mutant rat (voiced by Jackie Chan) raised them, we do get a few good laughs out of a sprinkling of cleverly effective gross-out humor.

I suppose I should admit: I think I once saw the original film, in 1990. I would have been fourteen years old. I know I haven’t seen a single one of the other films. I don’t have a whole lot to compare to with authority, at least not that plenty of longtime fans will be apt to compare. The entire premise is, admittedly, pretty stupid. Amazingly, Mutant Mayhem is only the second of the seven films to be animated, and animation is a far better fit for something so over-the-top dumb.

Rogen costars as a mutant rhinoceros goon. He and his co-producers and co-directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears (respectively a writer and artist on The Mitchells vs the Machines) sure managed to get a lot of big names for the rest of the voice cast: Maya Rudolph as mad scientist Cynthia Utrom; John Cena as fellow mutant rhino Rocksteady; Rose Byrne as mutant crocodile Leatherhead; Giancarlo Esposito as the mutants’ scientists father; Paul Rudd as Mondo Gecko; Hannibal Buress as Ginghis Frog; and Ice Cube as the villainous literal Superfly.

When it come to the animation style of this film, I have to say, I’m ambivalent. There’s something deliberately messy about it, falling just this side of scribbles, giving everything an off-kilter look. An unsettling number of human characters have their faces drawn with such mismatched and misshapen eyes they consistently made me think of Sloth from The Goonies (another reference most teenagers won’t give a shit about).

As you may have gathered, I’ve had to get past kind of a lot in order to enjoy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. But you know what? I did. Taking myself to see this movie on an early Monday evening—with several other exclusively middle-aged audience members—was not a waste of time. Do I think I would have missed much had I not gone? I suppose not. But it was a fun excursion nonetheless. Even that characterization makes it far better than anyone would reasonably expect the seventh film in an aging lower-tier franchise to be.

Did I mention *The Bear*’s Ayo Edebiri is also in this? Oh, and the turtles: Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, and Brady Noon. They’re all fine.

Overall: B